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Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

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Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#571
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not true. Gachapon mechanics existed long before, valve only took it to western market, not knowing the consequences. Remember this is way before gambling sites. It was a way to earn a cool random hat on TF2.

> not knowing the consequences Yeah right, they just accidentally massively profit from it. Come on dude, Valve has behavioral psychologists on staff. They don't just accidentally abuse players.

They are for profit business. Even grocery chains have behavioral psychologists. Valve doesn't run the gambling sites, they even tried to stop it multiple times. [1][2]

Valve doesn't pocket anything from the direct trade. Their cut is the same regardless the selling price of an item, except when traded through steam marketplace.

The only benefit valve stands to gain from this is the free marketing. Their business in this sense is not much different from trading cards, except the goods are digital.

[1] https://www.hltv.org/news/43421/valve-bans-skins-gambling-ca... [2] https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/30/14440958/team-fortress-2-g...

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#572
post #4

I love the readme on the gitlab page [1]. It feels so.. friendly :) > This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck, under a Creative Commons license. This includes an STP model of each, an STL model of each, and an engineering drawing with critical features/keep outs for each. Feel free to use these to make your own Puck holders, Contro…

Sometimes I wonder what we did to deserve Valve and how long it can possibly last.

[dead]

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Steam purchase I have more confidence in than a physical game copy to survive. I trust Steam to honor its agreement with me more than I trust in myself and my feline overlords to keep a game CD alive. In a previous timeline, this has led to me going on ebay to find CDs of a long lost game (EarthSiege 2), which I promptly uploaded to the Internet Archive as the one distributed by the current license-holder at the ti…

Sure, I agree with all of those things, but the fact still stands, Steam is actively lying to customers as the store pages say "Buy" and "Purchase", not "Rent" or "Lease", which are more accurate. You don't actually own the product. Don't get me wrong, as mentioned, I use Steam and like Steam/Valve, but that move is a bit shitty regardless.

When I check out on Steam it displays this text to me:

> A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#574

Open sourcing the CAD files is a huge win for repairability. I wish more hardware companies would adopt this approach for discontinued products.

They only open-sourced the external surface, not the internals, so it doesn't help repairability much

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#575
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked in game dev in 2008, we loved Steam, for the same reason we loved the iOS App Store. We take it for granted these days but the ability to self-publish on a first class platform and receive 70% of the sales revenue literally redefined the indie game dev industry. Use of the term ‘rent seeking’ is, in my experience, often correlated with a sense of entitlement and a lack of appreciation for what i…

I'm surprised you haven't been flagged or just a dead comment. Any signals that Apple is not pure evil for taking 30% is not part of the echo chamber group think around here. People never want to admit that it costs money to retail your product no matter where it is. In the physical world, there's manufacturing and delivery costs. Getting shelf space at a retailer takes a lot of negotiating where you have very very l…

The problem with Apple is not the 30% cut, it's that you're not allowed to use other app stores or install apps without their store.

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could, but that doesn't make /either/ an acceptable to market towards kids.

Yeah, because that would be like selling packs of baseball cards to kids with enticements like chewing gum, a practice that was outlawed in the United States in the 1950's.

Was it outlawed in the 50s? I remember getting baseball cards with gum in the 90s...

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without steam, I'd still be playing my CD version of Homeworld 2. I have paid $10 for every $1 of game I play, perhaps as high as $100:$1. A 30% cut of that seems totally reasonable. I have hundreds of games I keep just in case, and have played 10s of games I'd never have considered because they dont appear in Game Informer, PC Gamer, GoG, Twitch, Youtube, or other channels. They just are magically brought to me by s…

Of course 30% seems reasonble to you, you're not the creator of the games. It's quite confusing to me that you're endorsing the side that has an insane ROI instead of the side that is sufferring greatly to make ends meet.

If they're suffering greatly to make ends meet, then why use Steam at all? The only reason I can think of is that Steam provides a great customer experience, making that 30% worth it for the developers.

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the 30% cut. Developers can actually generate steam keys and publish them on third-party sites which can be redeemed by users on Steam. Developers then get 100% of the profit.

But they're only limited to 5000 keys. beyond that requires special approval, which is not given if the game is being sold more outside Steam than inside.

So publish the game on your own website? Why do you need to use Steam in this case?

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#579
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it more moral to allocate goods to the people who are willing to pay the most for them, or to the people who have good scalping bots/happen to get lucky

Is this question not ridiculous? A company can make something without the need to be greedy. If you allow backordering like OP mentioned, it goes a good way to resolving the issue.

Agreed, it's an absurd false dichotomy

Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I agree with all of those things, but the fact still stands, Steam is actively lying to customers as the store pages say "Buy" and "Purchase", not "Rent" or "Lease", which are more accurate. You don't actually own the product. Don't get me wrong, as mentioned, I use Steam and like Steam/Valve, but that move is a bit shitty regardless.

When I check out on Steam it displays this text to me: > A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.

This is what I see on the checkout page: https://i.imgur.com/diOkyCM.png

There is a product in the cart, which is a game, and the button says "Purchase", no where does it say anywhere that it's a license (although that's obvious), nor that I don't actually "own" this game after I "purchase" it.

Sure, minor detail perhaps, but I'd still argue that something Steam could do better, and since the industry is lacking self-regulation about this, I'd argue more regulations are needed for this even.

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